Mapping Hacks

I confess to reading the American political blogs as if they were a distributed “Hello” magazine.
I enjoyed the coverage of Sarah Palin’s benediction by the witch-hunting pastor Thomas Muthee. The Christian Science Monitor reported in 1999 on Muthee’s efforts at Targeting cities with “spiritual mapping”

“Spiritual Mapping” is the collaborative mapping component of militant evangelism . A team of the devout researches and annotates spaces meeting with disapproval - non-conforming churches, vendors of magic supplies, family planning clinics, gay bars. Thus is gathered “the strategic information necessary for effective intercessory “smart prayer” deployment.“, and warfare (in the form of cluster prayer bombardment) is carried to the territorial spirits.

The roundest critiques of spiritual mapping come from within the evangelical movement itself, viewing it as a magical, works centered ploy, unjustified by scripture and infected by an unhealthy sensationalism. Good works and good faith alone don’t satisfy the impulse to activism. As games with the language of “neo-pagans” lost its appeal, mappers play with the language of military planners, and pronounce “strategic level spiritual warfare” on the genius locii.

I want to see some of these maps.

Posted in collaborative mapping |

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